How Competition And Collaboration Push Accessibility Tech Forward

AI can empower without overstepping, but only if we design with people, not for them. We sit down with Christopher Patnoe, Head of Disability Innovation for Google EMEA, to unpack what’s working inside Google’s Accessibility Discovery Centers and why cross-company collaboration is speeding up inclusive tech. From hands-on demos that reframe complex info for neurodivergent thinkers to camera features that help blind users take better photos, the focus is on targeted AI that removes friction without trying to replace human judgment.

We dive into the messy middle where innovation meets real life: captions that must be accurate yet respectful, humor that shouldn’t punch down but should still allow agency, and wearables that balance safety, comfort, and utility. Christopher shares why augmented reality has more day-to-day value than VR, how competition among Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, and others drives better features, and where open platforms create more room for customization. We also zoom out to the global picture—building for Nairobi and the Appalachians alike—where bandwidth, cost, and reliability demand offline modes and graceful fallbacks.

Privacy and trust anchor the conversation. Useful by default even if the system knows nothing about you; deeper personalization only with consent. We talk data ownership, the risks of account sharing, and how corporate longevity and infrastructure investment affect AI’s future. Is the real value in the models, or in what people build on top? Christopher explains why durable ecosystems may outlast hype cycles, and why the most inclusive solutions come from communities who repurpose tools in unexpected, brilliant ways.

If you care about accessibility, XR, AI ethics, and inclusive design that actually lands in the real world, this one’s for you. Subscribe to stay close to the evolving story, share this with a colleague who builds products, and leave a review with the one feature you wish your favorite device had.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Overview
• 0:23 Scaling Accessibility Discovery Centers
• 2:16 Showcase: Neurodiversity And AI Tools
• 4:23 Live Transcribe And Guided Frame
• 6:04 Lessons From Google Glass And Guardrails
• 10:23 XR Competition And Open Platforms
• 13:45 AR Use Cases Across Disabilities
• 16:01 Vision For Contextual AI Assistance
• 19:55 Wearables, Safety, And Real-World Constraints
• 22:40 Global Design And Connectivity Realities
• 26:16 Privacy, Data Ownership, And Trust
• 30:03 Culture, Expectations, And Evolving Norms
• 31:13 Collaboration, Thanks, And Close

Transcript

Neil Milliken: 0:00

Hello and welcome to AXSChat. It's just myself and Deborah today, plus our esteemed guest, Christopher Patnoe. Chris is the head of disability innovation for Google EMEA. Good friend of mine too. Welcome back to AXSChat . It's been a little while since we've had you on. So please tell us a little bit about what you've been up to in the intervening weeks and months.

Christopher Patnoe: 0:23

Thank you. I think the thing I'm most proud of is the work that we're doing with the Accessibility Discovery Centers or ADC. We now have six of them. Whereas when we started the first one here in London back in December of 2022, we've opened in Dublin, Dubai, Munich, Zurich, and Milan. It's kind of like a fashion show of accessibility coolness. But what's really neat for me is that we want to, I mean we intend to teach about inclusion, building with people, not for people. We teach about disability-led innovation, but we also show things from Microsoft and Samsung and Sony and Apple, and because no one has all the answers. So if you show a little bit from everybody, you realize that I can do this. It doesn't have to be a big company. So that kind of innovations are really exciting, and we've been expanding it more and more and more. We're starting to show business impact inside Google, which makes it easier for me to do what we're doing this year, which is opening three more. I'm not going to say where, well, we'll announce it when we get there. But let's just say we'll be on two more continents and another country in Europe. So this opportunity to teach about accessibility and disability inclusion and disability innovation is really important and really that excites me a lot.

Neil Milliken: 1:38

Thanks, Christopher. And I've had the pleasure of visiting your ADC in Dublin, and it's very remiss of me, but I've not yet been to the one in London, which is the original. So I hope to put that right. We'll fix that. And yes, I can I can testify to the fact that you've got stuff from all over the place. And I think that's one of the things that I really like about the accessibility profession and community. There is this sense of collaboration even between competing organizations that they want to share the things that are making things better in the world because you know a righty a rising tide raises all boats. So and I I know Deborah's got a question, but I mean, what what are the just before you move away from the the ADC, what are some of the things that you're showing now in the ADCs that that really get your visitors engaged?

Christopher Patnoe: 2:30

Yeah, I think there's probably four things. I'll just I'll go quickly, but on the Neurodiversity Station, we show Notebook LM. If you don't know what this is, it's it's a brilliant application. This one's from Google. And what this does, it actually allows you to refactor information into the way that may be easier for you to understand. So you could put in a paper or put in a bunch of websites, it'll chunk on it for a while, and then you can you can you can chat with the AI about what it is, or you could have like a two-person NPR style conversation podcast, or even interrupt and ask questions with these voices. Or you can have it done as an infographic or mind map or a video. It's it's really exciting how these new AI models can take information, make it easy to understand. Another good one, actually, I'll just talk about three for sake of time. Another good one is Live Transcribe, which is an app of ours that has 120 different languages support. And you can do real-time transcription, including sound notifications and things like that. So you could be in a dinner and you put the phone down and you can read what people are saying. And if they call your name, you can get notifications so you can pay attention more easily. And then the last one is guided frame, which is a feature in the pixel camera, which allows someone who's blind and visually impaired to take a selfie because we do provide real-time support in terms of how to move the phone so that you or or all the people you're with are there. And then you can use AI to have you describe what you want and all that kind of stuff to make sure no one's eyes are closed or that kind of stuff. So it's it's a really thoughtful use of targeted AI in the last two, and a great example of what these new large language models can do in the first one. So technology helping supplement a person's ability to do the things that they want.

Debra Ruh: 4:18

It's just so powerful. And uh I know that we've talked offline, all of us, about Google Glass. You know, and I I had heard before that Google considered Google Glass a big failure. And I hope Google doesn't, because if Google hadn't gone to all this trouble to do everything it done, you know, we were we wouldn't be seeing what happened with Apple at CES. I mean, y'all were the ones that started it. And so I I really applaud, I I happen to really like the Google brand personally. And so, but I am curious, and you've already talked about it a little bit about hey, uh how AI is impacting it. And also, you know, I appreciate that Google, such a big well-known brand, is really still making sure that all humans are can be included and that we can all participate. But how do you think AI is going to shift it even more? I mean, making sure, because I agree with what you said, Christopher, AI is here to support us, to help with the gaps, to help us do more, to think better. I once again it will kill us and all that ridiculous doom gloom. But I'm actually really excited about what it can do for our community. And it sounds like you and Google are as well.

Christopher Patnoe: 5:26

We we well, first I want to say the AI isn't perfect. It gets things wrong all the time. We're always working with bias, we're always trying to make it better and more robust and more useful. So before I start, it ain't perfect. No one's AI is perfect. And if they're saying it's perfect, they're selling it something. That said, what was interesting about Google Glass is it was one of these that it's a really good idea, but the tech wasn't mature enough. And and we over and and Sarah Gabriel recently said that he we overpromised. And then Robert Scobel took a picture of himself in the in the bathroom naked with it. And I think that freaked everybody out justifiably. I know I know Neil, he was here on your on your show, so I apologize if he's listening to this right now. But I think I think it was too early, in in all honesty. But what's happening now, and our friends at Meta owned this, the meta Ray Band specs are really cool. And they didn't intend to make a product for the blind television, but the community found it and and actually made it their own, so much so that Meta is doubling down on AI in these specs. So that's really great to see. And now we get to see the competition because this year you're gonna start seeing Android XR, or you could, I would expect us to see Android XR glasses. And Android XR is the Google platform designed for XR. Samsung has just shipped sort of a headset version of it, sort of like the Apple Vision Pro, but it's it's the Android XR version of that. And I think it's reasonable to assume we'll start seeing glasses-based versions, similar to what Meta is is talking about now. And what's neat for me though, is now we get to have competition. And that's when you really start to see the innovation. Neil's point in the beginning is that we help each other and we do. For example, Microsoft helped Google understand how to create our disability support group. They're really, really helpful for that. And we've all come together and created the accessibility speech project where we have non-typical speech data at a university in Illinois. Anyone can have access to this to make everyone's voice understanding in ASR better. But we'll still compete tooth and nail in terms of the features because we all think our stuff is the coolest and our stuff is the best or as good as we can get. And there's value to that. Again, it's not perfect, but for me, there's a flexibility to having a more open platform on Android than somebody that's more proprietary on Meta. That's my choice. But if you have nothing, take what you got. But when you have competition, see what's useful. And that's when the fun starts to begin.

Debra Ruh: 7:45

Can I also just say something? And then I'll turn it over to Neil. Well, once again, I appreciate Google. Nobody's perfect, nobody's perfect, but I see Google trying. I see Amazon trying too. And I'm gonna give you two quick examples. And first of all, I'm gonna do it on Google that they have well-known people know have adopted downscamer and just keep me hot. We were playing a game, we were playing some Google game, or one of my friends said, Oh, this is so cool, Deborah. I'm gonna take a picture of you. And Google is going to what is the word? It's gonna spoof me. So it starts, it's there's another word for it, but so it's gonna start making fun of me. So it was like, oh wow, nice hair. And it made fun of my friends. It was just sort of this cute little thing that it's like, I don't know, it it roasts. That's what it's called, it roasts you. And so I did it and made fun of my hair. I did it, I went and it was cute. We took it and with Sarah with Down syndrome, took a picture of her and did it. And Google came back and said, it is not appropriate to be making fun of people with disabilities. And it said it really nicely, but it would not let Sarah play. And by the way, thank you, Google. Thank you. But I thought, how hard is your job? How hard is your job? And then the same thing happened with Alexa that I'm beta testing Alexa right now and she needs some help. But but I appreciate that they're trying, and I love Amazon. But same thing happened. We were talking about something and we and it was sort of making fun of us. And I said something about making fun of Sarah with Down syndrome, and it stopped me and it told me that is not appropriate, and it lectured me. And I was like, Google, we love you guys, but how in the world are you supposed to do this?

Christopher Patnoe: 9:24

Well, the uh well, here's I I have two minds of this, and this is Christopher speaking about Google at this particular moment. We should let that there needs to be a balance of when is it when do you include everyone? Because, for example, you look at captions, and we when you swear in captions, if you look on Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, YouTube, we always obfuscate because the AI will get it wrong. We hide it, but we will say like F star star star or F dash dash dash. So you can contextually understand what we thought we heard. The deaf community has the right to know everything that's being said, but the people we're trying to capture have the right not to be slandered. So how do you circle that square? There's no right answer. And then you want to start talking about overall inclusion. What if the person wanted to be made fun of because they want to be made fun of? She wanted to be played. She wanted to be played about, oh my gosh, how hard. Exactly. And there's no right answer because everyone's needs are different.

Debra Ruh: 10:19

Right, right. And also, let me say, maybe it wasn't a Google app. I mean, maybe it was just an app that was on Google, but I credited Google for it. So trying to do the right thing, I I just appreciated that. So over to you, Neil.

Neil Milliken: 10:31

Yeah, thank you. And I've seen similar things where we've been trying to use image generation tools, not in the grok way, by the way, but we've been trying to we've been trying to use image generation tools to create some fun images of people with disabilities in situations. So we were saying, well, you know, we're a bunch of disabled people. We want to go rob a bank, we want some money. And we were trying to use, you know, generative AI, and it was refusing to to generate the images of of people with disabilities misbehaving. It would create images of bank robbers, but not disabled bank robbers. And it's a so I think that intent is not malign. But at the same time, if we want to be truly included, we should be able to see ourselves represented in comedy and in these other things. But how you build all of that stuff into the guardrails and the algorithms is a challenge for sure. And it is a work in progress.

Christopher Patnoe: 11:28

This is always going to be a work in progress.

Debra Ruh: 11:31

So it's like you're a gigantic ID company, you know, great, but you now have to solve all of our social problems. Right now, you got to figure it out. Because same thing happened to me, Ani or Chris or Neil, whatever your name is, today it's Sunny on the screen.

Neil Milliken: 11:47

But that's just my Google account, and someone's been playing with it. You need new IT. Yeah, I need new IT. Well, in in this particular case, it's like I need I need to have a Google account that's not shared. Or an Amazon account as well, because that really screws up the metadata and and it confuses all of the algorithms. I mean, my Amazon account's shared, and I get recommendations for all kinds of products that would look just great on me. Yeah. Why? I mean, it never stopped uh Conchita Words from winning the Eurovision Song Contest. I'll let you go with that one. Yeah. You know. Oh, it's the joys of not being employed. You can say things like this. So, yeah, I I where am I going with this? I'll probably stop. I'll I'll wind back and and and start talking about a bit more about XR because I actually have been excited about XR for a long time. And I think that the utility of XR in terms of sort of augmented reality and extending reality and building upon our capabilities while still being in the real world is far more useful for far more people than virtual reality. Virtual reality has its place, right? It's great in gaming, it's great for simulations, it's great for sort of teaching scenarios and stuff like that. But you know, walking around with a great big headset on on top of your head and not really being aware of your surroundings, it's not real-world that viable. You're gonna get neck pain and all the rest of it. So I think that there are real a few things that are going to see sort of XL glasses really take off. One is they're far more portable. I mean, they're lightweight, then they're not going to give you sort of a permanent neck strain because of the weight of the thing. And two is because that you're still in the world around you, and what they're doing is augmenting. So I think that then you're going to get the the sort of information overlay that you might need to do better in your job, or to the contextual stuff. And I think that, as you said before, the original Google Glass was ambitious, and we were seeing some of that contextual stuff, but artificial intelligence and LLMs and just the general knowledge graph now is so much better at sort of predictive analytics and so on, that it's going to be able to feed you with much more relevant information now than previously. So when we think about this in terms of an accessibility context, what are the sort of features that you think are going to really sort of gain traction? And and that we're seeing some of them already in the metaclass.

Christopher Patnoe: 14:29

Yeah. So it's what's I find really fun is talking to different different people with different kinds of disabilities. So I was talking to some friends who were blind who were saying, why do you want to put lenses on on AR glasses? I said, because deaf people might want to be able to read captions. I'm like, oh my God, I never thought of that. And sort of a flip on the other side talking to deaf people. Then why do you care about the speakers? Well, because some people some people can use them. So I think we need to understand that everyone's needs are going to be slightly different. So is you're never going to have any one set of glasses that meets everyone's need. You're going to have the kind that have just the just the speakers. You're going to have the kind that's monocular or binocular. And all that kind, and the way you present the information changes with each of these different styles of extended reality, augmented reality. I've been working on this on and off since 2010. When I was at Sony Erickson, we were, we were doing, we were working with uh augmented reality on a phone that I was working on. And when I went to Disney, we were doing AR on the phone, where we actually did a Tinkerbell going around trying to find berries of different kinds of colors. And it was, but it was we we burned the battery in half an hour. The technology wasn't there. Here comes Google Glass, and it's a great idea, and it's a great step in the right direction. But where we are now with this AI integration, with these sensors, like cameras, like speakers, and all this all this stuff, it all really creates an opportunity to be able to show you in a way that you can be presented it information, whether it's visual information, auditory information, contextual information. I mean, my dream is to be able to hand a pair of glasses to a friend of mine who's blind here at Google and say, meet me at Big Ben and get some coffee on the way, be in an hour, and have them go without having to memorize the map, explore, ask what's going on around them. That's remarkable. That's where we're, that's where we're going to get to. We're not there now.

Speaker 2: 16:21

Right.

Christopher Patnoe: 16:21

And you'll always want to have a cane. This is where you're going to want to. This is where we will be able to go because we're getting a better understanding of things in the visual space, but also knowing where you are in space, in space and time. And then as we get to know you as a person, then you will know if you're a black sheep coffee person versus the pret coffee person, and it'll take you to the right coffee for you. Again, there's no such thing as good coffee, bad coffee unless it's unless it's Starbucks. Sorry. Everyone's needs are different in terms of the coffee tastes. And and if you let this AI agent, entity, whatever, understand you, it will be able to provide more value. And and and that's going to be really interesting to me is that time when we have a knowledge of you, a knowledge of what you want to do, and we can let you explore the world. Yes. That's what gets me excited. And then I've been I've been trying to work on this for about eight years now.

Debra Ruh: 17:11

And it is exciting. I know that we were we were looking at some of the uh just me and my partner, we were looking at some of the glasses that you can get on Amazon. And it was like, and I was talking to the oh, I was talking to a group called X-ray, X-A X-R-A-R. Yeah, yeah, and really, really cool stuff. But they're the ones like, yeah, we we booked the app and we put it on the glasses that are on Amazon. And I was like, we're there, we're there now that I can actually go and buy glasses. And and I went into T-Mobile for something, and the man was wearing the glasses and he was doing this, and I'm like, what are you doing? Anyway, and he started showing me we put them on, and they are really cool. And then you've got the rings. It's like I see all this wearables with it, but one thing that I'm curious about as somebody that is not a young person is do the young people want this all happening, or the younger generations want this happening on glasses, or do they want to happen on rings, or they want to put it inside their bodies, or do they want it on watches? So I also think I guess in some ways it doesn't matter as much as whether we put it on a glass. I guess we're gonna get there, right? So that it doesn't matter. And maybe we'll get to the point, Christopher, where the glasses are so good that I don't want to use my cane. I'm not gonna use the cane because I feel that confident that I can navigate my world with just the glasses.

Christopher Patnoe: 18:35

It's it's gonna be a while before we get there. Physics is difficult and you don't have to charge your cane. So I think there's always gonna be a time when you'll need physical, non-digital things. Again, it's all supplementation and it's up to each individual to supplement the things that matter the most to them. Some people may just want to watch, some people may want glasses. I think where we are though is we're we we we recognize that having a phone between you and the world is not a great user experience. And sometimes it's dangerous because there's still this whole idea of phone theft and stuff like that. So the safer you can make yourself and get the information that you want.

Debra Ruh: 19:08

And stepping off the road and stuff like that. I know, I know, I'm right. But that's what you'll have to solve when you're solving these problems. You don't just solve, oh, we're gonna make these glasses work. You got to make sure that Sarah, my daughter with Down Center, isn't being made fun of with one. I it's just, I'm just saying it's really a big topic.

Christopher Patnoe: 19:27

Just to be clear to you guys. And it's never gonna be done. And and we're always gonna be solving someone's yesterday's problem. Because what's okay for you is gonna be different for somebody else. Depending on who's yelling the loudest, that may that may make that issue rise to the fore. But this is gonna keep us busy forever because people are hard and and it's a big world, and we have really interesting, different challenges in Africa. I mean, I wear a Kenyan bracelet on my wrist every day to remind me that what we make has to work there.

Speaker 2: 19:55

Okay.

Christopher Patnoe: 19:55

Just because it works in London, just because it works in Silicon Valley, doesn't mean it's gonna meet the need of some. Someone in Nairobi. And if we do this right, everything we make will work where you are, when you are, whether you have good Wi-Fi or not, whether you have good sell or not, you want to have a thoughtful fallback experience when the tech is ready. So you have to take this global view to meet the needs of someone who lives in the Appalachians. Because if I solve it for the for someone in Nairobi, I'm solving problems in the Appalachians as well. So even in the US, there's situations that are that are more common with a third world emerging market than not.

Neil Milliken: 20:29

I would wager that the 5G signal in Nairobi is considerably better than it is in the Appalachians.

Speaker 2: 20:37

In most of the US.

Neil Milliken: 20:39

Or Surrey, just outside London for that matter. I spent time out in Thailand where the 5G signal is ubiquitous because they didn't have the picked line infrastructure. So they just went full on into putting in the 5G infrastructure. And you know, you get fantastic coverage and bandwidth pretty much everywhere. Yeah. But that you know so yes, you have to build devices that work in in different contexts, cultural context, geographical contract, connectivity context, etc. I think the price? Price, yes, absolutely, as well. I think then also Deborah mentioned a few things about sort of acceptance. And there are some really thorny issues to grapple with in terms of user data, privacy, you know, who who owns that data about you, right? So yes, certain like AI knowing about you can give certain utility, but it can also just open up a lot of vulnerability about yourself. You know, there's there's so much of us known, right? And now when you're starting tracking people's eye movements and and you know, and then Deborah was talking about you know whether people want actually embed the technology inside their bodies. We're now talking about, you know, we're moving from augmented humans on the outside to creating androids and not your phone androids. Cyborgs, cyborgs. Cyborgs, yeah. Exactly. Sorry, cyborgs. So and and and so then you know, we're getting into a whole another conversation about sort of transhumanism and and stuff like that.

Christopher Patnoe: 22:11

And these conversations always go there. These conversations always go there.

Neil Milliken: 22:15

Absolutely. And I think that whilst I love tech and I'm someone that's been building tech around disability for a a long time, I'm pretty cautious about my own personal data. Now we we have a a a mutual friend, Hector Minto, right? And Hector is far less cautious about his personal data than I am, right? And he won't mind me saying this because he's been going and towing everyone, his his so he he had the meta classes. And he was carrying his data, not just with Meta, but with Microsoft, which was his important at the time. So he was sending, setting, telling Meta to send stuff to co-pilot. So, you know, he was like, Yeah, right, data, yeah, personal data everywhere. Now, I think that's individual choice, but it's how organizations manage that individual choice, I think is going to become more and more of a lies issue as people already start to understand, we hope they start to understand, just how much companies know about them.

Christopher Patnoe: 23:15

I'm not fully able to talk about all of that in in depth. But what I think for me is important is that we have a useful experience if we don't know who you are. And and if you find value and trust in that organization, if you tell us more about you, we can provide more value. But we have to start with valuable pro with valuable information, begin with, and then earn the trust over time. And I I frankly know how difficult it is to get anything done here. So I trust less stuff with Google. But my daughter doesn't. My daughter is a Luddite, she doesn't even have Instagram and she's 17. And so it's really interesting watching generations evolve with their to your point, Deborah. Are they going to want it? Depends on who you talk to. My daughter doesn't know her phone is half the time because she doesn't use it. And yet, literally last night she found out she got into medical school here in the UK. So it's not like she's dumb. It's that she resists to do her work as opposed to doing Instagram. And that's why she's going to medical school. So everyone's need is going to be different. And it's all okay. But again, we have to have a useful experience if we know nothing about you. And then you can build up the trust. Wow. Yeah.

Neil Milliken: 24:18

Yeah. And and and I think, you know, organizations have different approaches to trust. Apple is very personal privacy focused. Meta, less, sir. So you know, so that you know you can understand, you know, particularly sharing across platforms. So those those kind of things that I think I think the other thing is you can share your data with an organization you trust, but you don't know that that organization is going to be only by someone trustworthy in the future and where that data goes as well, because that's a data ownership can flow through. You know, companies get taken over. You have changes of leadership, you have changes of political leadership, and all of these things can impact on that. And so, to a certain extent, I'm a little bit of a Luddite when it comes to this stuff. I'm a bit more privacy focused, a bit more not quite German, because having worked with my my German colleagues, they're super privacy focused. Yeah. Having worked with them, it it's made me think about it a little bit more because my my default was always, you know, share is going to be useful. But but now it's it's I think you have to think about the trade-offs. Yeah. If I share this, company's gonna get this information. Do I feel comfortable with it? Yeah.

unknown: 25:26

Yeah.

Neil Milliken: 25:27

And sometimes the utility is so great that even if you feel slightly uncomfortable, you might just take that decision to do it anyway. But I'm with you, the default experience, whether the company knows about you or not, should still be useful.

Debra Ruh: 25:38

Right. And it just is overwhelming. The reality is it's overwhelming. So it's like I try to protect my privacy. And then I'm hearing, of course, I'm an American, so I'm hearing every two seconds that I've just was my private information, my dog's name when I was a child, everybody knows it was lucky. I mean, my information has been stolen so many times that I just don't really I appreciate it. I don't care anymore because I just feel like they know. And also I'm a I'm always on the internet because of the work I do. So I'm already a public figure anyway. But it it's I know that's bad when you get to the point where you're so exhausted by it that yeah, I'm probably me and Hector are a lot alike. You're just exhausted by it. But it I think it's so important to talk about these things and for our audience to understand that, because I know that especially these times when skin isn't in the United States, we're all just feeling corporations are just really a big old problem, as well as political things in our country as well. But I think understanding that corporations are made up of people and that there are a lot of good people really still in these corporations trying to make a difference and figuring out how we navigate all this together when so many changes are being made. And at the same time, so much information is going out that's so frightening. Like in two years, even though this keeps moving. Well, I don't know, I don't know, two years all jobs will be gone. 90, 95% of jobs will be gone. It's like, come on, guys, stop saying stupid stuff like that. Things are gonna change and shift, and we're gonna figure it out. We ignore we're not there. There, that's not gonna happen in two years. Might be so I don't know how one thing that I appreciate about what's happening at Google and other big brands is that it does still appear to me, Christopher, like y'all are talking and helping each other and supporting each other in ways that I don't see in other fields. And you talked about that a little bit early on.

Christopher Patnoe: 27:36

Yeah. And and and I think it's important for us to realize that as technology changes, expectations change. So as we get used to having things on glasses, all the ways we interact with technology, all the ways we interact with our with each other change. So our expectation change of what's useful, what's not useful, what's okay, what's not okay within one culture. And then having moved from the US to here to the UK, I'm seeing a completely different culture. And we understand things in a different way. The food isn't as good as sometimes, but sometimes it's better. The jokes are all weird, no matter what you do, if you don't know what the television shows are, because all of these catchphrases in English television shows is off of the butt of a joke. So understanding culture, understanding timing, though all of those things matter. And as we create products, then we need to realize that it's gonna be used by everybody. And it's and it's been used by everybody over time. So again, this is another reason why it's not perfect, because what will be perfect today will not be perfect tomorrow.

Speaker 2: 28:33

Good point. Good point. Yeah.

Neil Milliken: 28:35

So I've just got one final thing I'd like to ask. There's a topic that we were talking about off-air, and and that was no, it's it's okay, it's safe. Um and this this this was actually around sort of at the moment, there are a lot of this huge amount of investment, there's huge people talk of a bubble in in and there's a lot of companies that are uh funded by debt in the AI space. And so where do you think the the value is going to be? Do you think that the AI is going to become commoditized? Because people are going to build upon these platforms. Maybe the value's not in the open AIs or the anthropics, but it's in the things that people build on top of them, in which case, you know, you know, not the the companies with the deepest pockets that are going to survive and provide the AI platforms that we're building on in three, five years' time.

Christopher Patnoe: 29:28

Well, taking a look at uh the the recent announcement by Apple, they they took on on Gemini as their as their their AI of choice. If you think if you assume that all of the AIs are of equivalent value, equivalent ability, some of them others for some things, et cetera, then and Apple would take a look at who do who is we want to build this once and we want to make it better over time. We don't want to have to do a brain transplant in three years from now because something a bubble bursts. Because Google is a thriving company before AI and we're doing even better with AI. My think, my feeling is we're safe. I'm not worried about losing my job. I'm not worried about Google going anywhere. But if you look at OpenAI and Anthropic, those are much newer companies and they're exciting and they have excellent technology, but their funding model is slightly different. And if there is a bubble, some people might be concerned. Again, I'm not smart enough to say one is better than the other, but I but I I would personally much rather work at Google than OpenAI right now because I I trust in the values of the things that we're doing, and I think we're gonna be here in five years. Most I can't say that about most companies in the world, regardless whether you're AI or not AI.

Neil Milliken: 30:33

No, absolutely. I mean, there's there's a few companies out there, yourselves, Microsoft, et cetera, that have the you know, the big cash reserves to be able to place the bets on the infrastructure and these things without going into huge amounts of debt. So I think that that that does change things. But it also changes the the sort of makeup of the companies because you know Google's always invested a lot in in infrastructure, and to a certain extent Microsoft has, but now the investment on infrastructure and hardware is much greater than it had been in in previous years. So it is changing the sort of the makeup of of organizations. So we've we've hit the end of our time. I could talk far longer. We'd love to do that. We should do this again. We should do this again. Yeah.

Debra Ruh: 31:17

Lots of quarter because we'd love to talk about this and watch it as it unfolds this year.

Neil Milliken: 31:22

You'll get bored, but I'm happy to try. Yeah. And and and we need to thank our friends at Amazon for sponsoring us and helping keep us on it. So thank you very much, Christopher. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Sunny. Thank you, Deborah.